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Michael Jansen: Racist in all spheres of life
June 04, 2012
No one should be surprised at the attacks by white Israelis on African immigrants in Tel Aviv and other areas of the country. Israel has always been a “racist” state. The government has set the negative tone of relations between Israelis and African migrants by branding as “infiltrators” those who illegally enter the country through Egypt, granting very few refugee status, and handing out few work permits. This has created a climate of fear and loathing among Israelis who live in the poorer neighbourhoods where immigrants dwell.
The recent anti-African demonstrations in Tel Aviv, during which cars carrying Africans and African shops were attacked, have pushed the right-dominated Likud government to initiate deportation proceedings against some 700 African migrants. The government also plans to build a new wall-fence complex along the country’s border with Egypt to prevent migrants from reaching Israel.
There are now some 60,000 Africans, mostly from Ethiopia and Eritrea, living in Israel. Although they account for less than one per cent of the population, they are accused of producing a crime wave in areas where they are concentrated, taking scarce housing, and being “anti-social,” whatever that means as far as Israelis are concerned.
During a protest near Tel Aviv’s bus station, where many immigrants have settled, Hananya Vanda, a Jewish Israeli of Ethiopian origin, was attacked by protesters who said they “did not know he was Jewish.”
Among the Africans to be deported is Simon Meyer, a Christian from South Sudan who arrived in Israel with his family five years ago. He was employed in a local company while his wife ran a school, now closed, for African children.
He told the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) that he had planned to settle permanently in Israel where he had hoped his son would serve in the army — which accepts only Jews in mainstream units and Druze and bedouin in special units. There is no place for Christian Africans. Therefore, his dream has faded and he could be forced to return to his homeland, which last year seceded from Sudan and became the world’s 193rd state. He is reluctant to repatriate because of ongoing troubles between Sudan and South Sudan.
Israeli politicians are exploiting the swell of antagonism against Africans for political gain. Legislator Yulia Shamalov Berkovich of the Kadima party, an offshoot of the Likud, has proposed that human rights activists who aid African immigrants should be thrown into labour camps. She said that such activists “would happily deport [Jewish Israelis] they did not like, settlers and the ultra-Orthodox — and keep the Africans here in Israel.”
The original targets of Israeli racism were indigenous Palestinians who were banned from work in Jewish colonies during the British mandate and ethnically cleansed during Israel’s 1948-49 war of establishment from the 78 per cent of Palestine captured by the Zionist underground army at that time.
Palestinians who remained and became citizens of Israel, now numbering 1.6 million, or 20 per cent of the population, lived under martial law for nearly 20 years and faced harsh discrimination in every sphere: schooling, healthcare, employment and provision for Palestinian municipalities. Since Israel was founded as a “Jewish state,” this was to be expected because the Palestinians were and are not Jewish.
Palestinians who live in Arab East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza which have been occupied since 1967 suffer even greater discrimination and are treated with contempt by Israelis.
However, Palestinians have not been the only targets of Israeli racism. Jews have also suffered from this evil. Indeed there is a pecking order with Israelis of Ashkenazi (Occidental or East European) stock being at the top — with Poles, Russians and Ukranians favoured — and the rest being considered “lesser beings,” particularly Jews of colour.
Jewish immigrants from this region, North Africa, Asia and Africa have been urged to settle in Israel, to swell its Jewish population and overcome the Palestinian demographic “threat,” the upcoming Palestinian majority in the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. By the 1970s, the Oriental Jews, the mizrachim, made up half of the population of Israel.
But these immigrants were not given the same treatment by the absorption authorities that has been accorded “white” Jews from Eastern and Western Europe and the Americas. Mizrachim who adhere to the Sephardi (Oriental) form of Judaism have been shunted to underdeveloped “development towns” in the Negev and elsewhere, impressed into low-paying jobs, and sent to trade schools instead of universities to swell the number of carpenters, plumbers, and metal workers.
Ethiopian Jews, who belong to an ancient Jewish community, were compelled to convert to one of the “orthodox” forms of Judaism — Ashkenazi or Sephardi — before being classified as Jews. There was considerable debate over whether Israel should accept under the “Law of Return” the “Black Hebrews,” Afro-American converts to Judaism.
The problem was so acute in the early 1970s that Israelis of Middle Eastern descent formed the “Black Panther” movement which raised the political awareness of the mizrachim, particularly those from Iraq, Morocco and Yemen. Arab Jews migrated to Israel not because they were drawn by Zionism, the yearning for “Zion,” but because some Arab countries responded to the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland by exacting retribution against local Jewish communities. Many Arab Jews were resentful of the Zionists and Israel which had forced them to leave their ancestral homes and lands.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Oriental Jewish resentments increased when Israel campaigned for the freedom of East European Jews, who encountered discrimination and even persecution in former Soviet bloc countries. These Jews, who swelled the population of white Ashkenazis and tipped the balance inside Israel in their favour, were treated better than the mizrachim, reviving resentment.
It is ironic that 40 per cent of the hundreds of thousands who immigrated to Israel from Russia and Eastern Europe were not Jews but Christians seeking a better life and, eventually, emigration to the US and Western Europe. Many of these Christians have faced problems over marriage or burial in Israel. Since it was founded as a “Jewish state,” provision has not been made to accommodate people of other faiths.
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The author a well-respected observer of middle east affairs, has three books on the Arab-Israeli conflict
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Received on Mon Jun 04 2012 - 10:44:03 EDT
